Observations of Constellations, Departure
by lyricsaboutcats
Summary: A lack of physical intention doesn't always mean that there's an absence of emotional attachment. Drabbles and short chapters. (Mordin/Femshep, ME2, on hiatus for rewrite)
1. Chapter 1

Perhaps, to the leftover stone, its previous life felt like only yesterday.

The lights of Omega were a counterfeit spectacle full of lackluster ambience, and they poured out from the asteroid into misguided directions. Its body had been barren and lifeless once, long ago; left to float away senselessly in the dark. Someone had revived it through pure will alone. That same someone would doubtless insist that they had improved the dead husk immeasurably.

Shepard had closed her eyes, and then a voice brought her back.

"He's fucking crazy," it informed her flatly.

She suppressed a smile. "Oh?"

Aria huffed slightly, sitting gracefully on her couch. "Don't misunderstand," she explained. "It's a compliment. He runs a clinic in the worst part of this place, helping assholes that probably don't deserve it." The asari paused, and then continued with a lofty smirk and a conspiratorial glance. "I've always liked him. He's as likely to heal you as he is to shoot you."

Shepard considered that, with her lips pressed into a frown, while she regarded the assortment of dead vorcha that eventually greeted her in the quarantine zone of the asteroid's slums. She motioned to her team. "Pick one up," she said, and hefted a body onto her shoulder.

Miranda Lawson balked, refusing. Zaeed Massani nodded and he helped Shepard move the bodies aside arbitrarily. When the pair finished, blood lingered on their armor.

"If he's good," Massani drawled, "he'll recognize it for what it is."

She nodded. "It's a test for both of us, I suppose."

Shepard considered that, too, with blood smeared on her cheek, while she passed by more broken bodies that had been lined up on pikes. A vorcha head challenged her silently as she approached the clinic, her steps and those of her team clicking tightly on dirty cement. A gauntlet of mechs guarded the entrance.

Inside, another gauntlet composed of the sick surrounded them. They were herded by assistants through corridors and into the back of the building where a salarian was pondering chemical treatments. He crossed his arms, raising a hand to tap his chin, and shifted his body in contemplation.

Professor Mordin Solus, the salarian scientist. He was a fate worse than dying from the plague, according to an infected batarian.

He enjoyed talking.

Shepard let him, watching his pacing with measured eyes and standing calmly. She wasn't going to give him a reason to attack her or her team with the omni-tool that he never seemed to put away. Eventually, he ran out of swift assertions about her origins and she introduced herself and her intentions.

He had been correct, and that made him smile. Still, he waved her notions away. "No, far too busy."

She pressed the issue, and he pressed the importance of curing the plague. She complied, and so he joined her once it had been cured.

"More authentic now," he nodded his head toward the fresh spray of blood covering her armor when he left with her team. She had fought through a small army of vorcha, far less dead than the first group, and then dispersed his remedy in a dusty environmental facility. He placed his hands behind his back, clicking his fingers together, and added: "Still, merely a symptom. Not a cause."

A doctor, a scientist, and a professor was now a member of the Normandy SR-2. He seemed to have many titles, just as she did.

They had a common enemy in the cause known as the Collectors.


	2. Chapter 2

"Impressive," was the first word, of many, that Mordin would say about the tech lab.

"I've been using this room for upgrades and reports," Shepard told him during a pause in his thoughts, showing him the terminal on the left side of the room. "If you'd like, I can move it."

He peered down at it, momentarily taking in its holographic charts. "Don't particularly enjoy excessive commotion while working," he murmured, thinking of the STG mechs surrounding the clinic that now belonged to his assistant, Daniel Abrams. It had been a relief to leave the machines on Omega.

Mordin had enjoyed Daniel's human presence, however, and so he thought of that instead when he stopped her hand from shutting off the terminal. "Loud, when you're here?" he asked her.

"I don't think so," she answered. "Perhaps I might be, to you."

He set a few instruments down and began to root through a cabinet. Cerberus crew members were already placing the equipment that he had requested and he was staring at a small containment unit when he finally said, "if it becomes a problem, will let you know."

Mordin turned away, and that was the end of the conversation.

Shepard appeared the next morning, holding a steaming cup with both hands and walking quietly. She nodded to him and then began her work. A few minutes of her silence passed by, followed by a particular smell drifting across his desk.

Mordin paused and looked up. "Eight hundred different compounds in two hundred milligrams," he said, mostly to himself. "Excessive amount of heterocyclic compounds are attractive, lead to enhanced awareness. Influences the smell, which is refreshing." He took a languid breath. "Not unpleasant."

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"Simply that you can stay," he responded.

Mordin felt four percent more productive that morning thanks to her being there, with her coffee.

Shepard eventually roused herself from whatever it was that occupied her on the terminal, and then a Carnifex M-6 clicked in its holster at her side while she made her way toward the far side of the slums of Omega. Someone had offended every single mercenary group on the asteroid and she wanted to know who it was.

She threaded a path through mobs of freelancers and then destroyed a gunship when she found the answer.

"You big cowled dummy," she murmured, her voice tinged with sadness and affection while she held tightly onto the turian who had been the culprit. "What were you thinking?"

The Archangel of Omega, now bleeding cobalt onto the floor, lifted a hand to hold onto her as they waited for the shuttle. He said nothing, because he couldn't speak.

"Stay with me," she whispered.

Massani and Mordin helped silently while she added another broken visage from the dirty asteroid to her repertoire. Her own scars glowed faintly when she did so.

It was a mysterious happenstance, and somewhat unexpected. When the salarian and former STG member joined, he expected to be greeted by an entirely human crew with a distinctly supremacist agenda. It would have been simple enough to accomplish his own goals while mostly ignoring the organization that he had agreed to work for. And yet, the small human woman running it didn't seem to be an adherent to any of its beliefs. Instead, she clutched at things like the injured turian that lay on the floor in front of them.

Interesting, he thought. Sentimental, but interesting.

Much like Aria and Omega, the human called Commander Shepard embodied the Normandy SR-2. And so, the ship became quite hospitable to anyone or anything that was brave enough to venture onto it without fucking with her. The turian, a quarian, and eventually a krogan were gathered up into the frigate. They were disarmed of everything but their weapons.

A small tinge of respect stole into Mordin Solus' eyes while he observed her.


	3. Chapter 3

An unstable biotic began to roam the lower levels of the Normandy SR-2, screaming obscenities like thunderclaps into the atmosphere and scorching electricity onto metal whenever her fingers brushed against the walls.

Shepard had closed her eyes each time a scream ripped through her body, and after a while the sound of it was suffocated by its own repetition.

Where was she?

"Both fucked in the ass by Cerberus," Jack finally decided when the intensity faded. The two women had something in common and they worked together entirely from that intersection.

A warden had imprisoned Jack, claiming he sold criminals to batarians despite the absence of evidence that he had ever done so. He mostly locked them inside glass boxes and watched them, or wrapped their bodies into misted shackles. He had even assumed to keep Commander Shepard, and then his prison was unceremoniously blown away in a charging flash that only proved how far out of his depth he had actually been.

Mordin worked at his desk in the tech lab, pondering the mistakes of the warden's notion until Shepard came to see him. Then he spoke of tissue samples and the momentum in his voice faded into something vaguely less harried when he realized that the space between them was quiet and just wide enough to accommodate his musings.

"I'm going to go eat lunch," she informed him during a pause. "Do you want to come with me?"

Mordin settled back into his typing and thoughts. "No."

She picked up the cup that sat by her terminal and wiped at the counter with a tissue. "Well, do you want me to bring you some food?"

He glanced up. "Yes, actually."

Later she returned carrying two boxes in front of her. She set them down on the floor, and then rooted around his cabinets. Mordin would have castigated her for it, but no one on the ship had ever brought him something to eat before. The crew seemed to think that salarians ate like birds despite their high metabolisms. He usually forgot about it himself, wrapped up in research.

Commander Shepard had appeared cold when they met, her body drenched in an accretion of ice that she didn't often shake away. As the ship became populated she began to warm ever so faintly, and the kindled core of her center would occasionally reveal itself in a downburst of dulcet connection that couldn't be sustained or controlled. It was usually a smile, like in this moment, or a laugh.

Shepard's cheeks were round whenever it happened.

"How many calories do you need to eat?" she asked, making a space beneath a counter.

"Approximately forty five hundred and three," Mordin answered. He paused from his research and crouched next to her. "Being older," he admitted, "perhaps not so many."

She nodded, opening the boxes and revealing their contents to him. One contained dozens of ration bars and the other was full of bottled water, topped with a cup that matched her own. She tucked them both underneath the counter for him.

From that day forward, Shepard kept one of his cabinets filled with edibles instead of tissue samples.

Mess Sergeant Gardner complained about the appropriated rations and Mordin would have voiced his own complaints, considering it was relatively tasteless human fare that he was now eating, but he enjoyed that she brought it to him and so he said nothing. Instead, he absentmindedly stared at the stars through the window in the lab and considered seeker swarms while he ate a chocolate bar that she had slipped into the box for him. When it was finished he gathered up a few more of the strangely textured sweets, wrapping them carefully and then setting them aside to be shipped to his nephew.

A modest gift from the Normandy SR-2, Mordin thought and would not write in his letter to the younger man. He smiled, enjoying the thought of his nephew's bright pigments that curled into a small picture. Very few things in his life had been kept pristine against the continued necessity of his work and the sprawling shade it draped over everything.

Professor Mordin Solus decided to tell Commander Shepard about the modified genophage he had wrought upon Tuchanka the next day, willfully casting a shadow across her face.

It had been the right thing to do.

He inhaled, believing it a little more when he said the words out loud.


	4. Chapter 4

The Collectors were a symptom of a larger cause.

Commander Shepard and the Alliance operations officer technically agreed with one another about the abducted colony called Horizon, and yet they still argued when they met there. The countermeasure against the seeker swarms worked incredibly well; they had ample time to voice their thoughts to one another.

Mordin wasn't terribly sure that was a good thing.

"You're working with Cerberus, Skipper. _Cerberus_." The officer's voice contained a striking note of abrasion and her words were acrid against their mark.

Massani shook his head. "Christ, Shepard. How many little nicknames do you have?"

"It's more complicated than that, Ash," Shepard told her. "You have to understand, the Collectors are working with the Rea-"

"I don't understand!" Her disgust was palpable. "You've turned your back on everything we stood for!"

The officer left, and Shepard silently watched her go. There was no one left to save on Horizon after that.

They were all gone.

Neither of the women knew if she was the real Commander Shepard. Perhaps she was only a clone, and the real entity could have successfully saved the colony from the mysterious horrors that would now befall its population. Whoever she was, Shepard was unusually reserved for an N7 marine despite the excessive amounts of property damage that she often caused in the field. She surrounded herself with jagged crests such as Massani or Jack to obscure her softer edges, and during her work with Cerberus she preferred to keep social company with those who hadn't known her before she died. Her voice was kind to the people on her ship and vaguely impatient with those who dwelt outside of it.

She was often furious about all of it, when she thought she was alone.

Shepard pitched her helmet aside in the elevator on the ship with a piercing thrust of sound erupting from her chest, angry and hastily isolated from everything except her own perceived failures on Horizon. The helmet clattered against the wall and then it tumbled until it finally glanced against someone's foot. She looked over with a small start of surprise and Mordin offered her a tilted glance, unsettled and slightly towering next to her in the enclosed space.

"Served with her previously?" He tried to spare her dignity and didn't mention the outburst.

Shepard hastily brushed away the moisture lining her eyes. "Ashley was my gunnery chief a long time ago." A bitter laugh escaped her. "I don't know what I was expecting from her."

"Less insults, possibly. Officially still working for Cerberus," he observed helpfully. "Her assumption was technically correct."

Shepard looked away with a sigh and her hand brushed through her hair. Mordin shifted uneasily while they ascended and she picked up the scorned helmet.

That had been unhelpful.

"Are you trying to make me feel better, or worse?" she asked after a long and awkward moment had passed.

"Better," he assured her.

She stepped out into the hallway in front of the cabin and smiled faintly. "You're bad at it, Solus."

"Aware of that," he conceded when she turned around to face him. He remained in the elevator. "Will still be here, if you need me. Not actually in this location. Tissue synthesis leads to spare time in lab. Would have liked to run tests on your officer friend, perhaps administered mood stabilizer or lamotrigine. Carefully, of course, fatal skin condi-"

The elevator door shut, cutting off the words he tossed quickly her way and closing on the much brighter smile that had landed on her face while she caught them. He descended to the command deck.

He inhaled.

Mordin didn't know if she was the real Commander Shepard. She was, however, one of the very few people who knew of his work and had still remained his friend. Her opinion of the issue had been negative and yet softly accommodating, and when he asked her why she had looked away.

"I found a rachni in the snow, a long time ago," she had said quietly, because it felt like yesterday and no longer was. She pressed her lips into a frown and wouldn't speak further of it. She merely assured him that the species was still extinct when he pressed her for details.

Shepard felt that perhaps it had been a mistake made for the right reasons; it was quite possible that they were both monsters.

Mordin had set it aside. Her opinion didn't matter because his own was the only correct possible answer, but he thought that the gumption of her statements, softened into diplomacy by her obvious sentimental bias toward him, was interesting. On Sur'Kesh, he was still Professor Mordin Solus. Anyone in the Special Tasks Group who had the clearance to challenge him about the genophage simply didn't. Creeping doubts were always swirling at the edge of his mind, unformed and pushed away by rational affirmations and clandestine endearments from the Salarian Union combined with the hard pragmatism of its surrounding culture.

Shepard's human presence was appealing in that aspect; technically unneeded and yet still appreciated for its contrast. Mordin did his best to keep it and she let him, despite their reservations about their own respective histories. He began to let his guard down, ever so slightly, as she remained and she responded by doing the same.

Very few had, before her. They all fractured away under the weight of the genophage's continued necessity while insistently approving of it.

Mordin frowned in the elevator, and then set it aside.


	5. Chapter 5

Miranda Lawson had been distinctly bothered after the ground team's report concerning a smuggling site on Daratar. The side trip had been brisk, with all team members and most of the illegal cargo accounted for. Everything had been excessively routine outside of three clamorous mechs.

She had paced, softly, while they spoke.

Massani's arm crossed over Mordin's chest, halting him in the hallway near the conference room after the pair left. The man offered an imperceptible nod and Mordin returned the gesture, not fully comprehending the breadth of its meaning.

They both stood there and silently waited.

Lawson's voice floated out from the room, perfectly edgeless in its practice of calm disapproval. "Do you really think it was wise," she asked, "to bring our lone scientist on that particular mission?"

"I think," Shepard answered, her voice also calm and yet less disapproving, "Mordin is better at identifying valuable technology than I am. Would the Illusive Man recommend someone who wasn't effective in the field, Miranda?"

There was a pause. "No, of course not." Lawson exhaled. "If something happens, however, or Solus is seriously injured... We need his expertise for research on the ship, Shepard."

Shepard switched to a diplomatic tone, because she felt there was logic in Lawson's argument. "I trust that if any member of my crew is uncomfortable performing certain duties," she insisted, "they'll inform me and arrangements can be made."

"There's also a small rumor that you've been giving him coffee."

There was less logic, suddenly. "Why the hell would I give him coffee?"

In the conference room Lawson nodded, silently agreeing that the implications would have been worrying.

Shepard placed her hands on the table and closed her eyes for a moment before reopening them. "Now, unless there are other pressing concerns, my skaldfish are either dead or incredibly hungry."

Mordin and Massani watched the pair of women leave the room. Lawson's face darkened at their presence, but remained silent while she passed them by. Shepard seemed unmoved.

Massani grunted with laughter once they were out of sight.

"Unimpressive assessments," Mordin noted, speaking mostly to himself. His current work was rewarding, but also relatively easy. He had been forced to begin side projects to fill his extra time, such as mapping contamination vectors.

"Nah, it was just posturing." Massani leaned against the wall and then glanced at him. "Miranda wants Shepard to respect her. You see the way most of the crew follows _the Commander_ there around this ship?"

Mordin blinked at that. "Hadn't noticed."

"Yeah, and Shepard pretends she doesn't," Massani scoffed. "You think I don't pay attention to my own boss? Everyone acts like she's gonna save the galaxy and hold their goddamn hands on the way."

Mordin nodded. He had noticed the galaxy saving issue and, to her credit, Shepard was firmly determined to bring every single person on the Normandy SR-2 back from the mission that Cerberus was planning to send them on. He had indulgently confided to her one day that he didn't mind the risk of the endeavor, preferring to perhaps end life on a proud note with a posthumous biography vid, but his words hadn't been comforting to her like he had intended them to be.

"I'm not going to let you die somewhere in the dark," she had murmured, thoroughly troubled by the idea while he passed her bacteria samples.

"Aware of my age, Shepard?" he asked her. "Thirty seven! Positively ancient, by salarian standards."

She put the sample down and placed her hand on top of his, resting them both on the counter. "It's a bad experience, Mordin."

He didn't bring it up again.

Suddenly thrust first-hand into the complications of inter-species recreational social interactions, Mordin felt that he had been rushed into incredibly deep water with her. His field work had been mostly research related, and interactions with aliens outside of the genophage modification were usually of the defensive or medical variety. Recent conversations with her had become noticeably more important for him to parse as they became closer and so he began to look at her body language, but something was lost in translation whenever her eyelids wavered salaciously.

They closed momentarily at the most inappropriate times, imploring him for procreative actions in antiquated ways.

Mordin frowned, thinking of it.

"I would have started drinking under that kind of pressure," Massani continued in the hallway, shaking his head slightly. "More, anyway. Would have fucking drowned myself in ryncol if Miranda was my second in command. She would have taken a pair of simpering bastards with her down to that planet, but not Shepard."

"Not Shepard," Mordin repeated equably, now listening closely.

"The old man squad, Moreau calls us." Massani snorted. He didn't smile at the nickname. "Shepard thinks we're the goddamn bees' knees. She appreciates someone with experience who's isn't afraid to give her a bollocking."

Massani decided the conversation was over and there was a hint of pride in his steps when he walked away.

Mordin still stood there, his light armor clicking when he crossed his arms. He leaned against the wall where Massani had done the same and then tapped a finger against his chin.

The human man seemed relatively confident in his assessments, despite the facial reconstruction that indicated a lack of success with them, but Mordin didn't know exactly what a bee was, nor why its knees were a distinctly desirable part of it for Shepard.

He pondered it, mulling over memories of their mostly equitable interactions. It was a relief to be in the field with someone who didn't require constant assistance or redirection. Shepard didn't hang off of his accomplishments and seemed relieved when he refrained from mentioning her own. She also didn't act interested in aggressively ordering him around and he wasn't going to treat her with the deference required of a Dalatrass or indulge her with the political etiquette they demanded.

That was refreshing; interesting, as always. Mordin smiled and then looked at his fingers.

Did she want to hold his hand and save the galaxy?

Her eyelids suggested she wanted something far more casual and less nuanced. That was an inherent problem with salarian physiology compared to other species; a lack of pleasurable hormone release during reproductive cycles. They were warm blooded, pro-social, and so touch and social situations were relatively enjoyable, but sex could be a non sequitur depending on the individual. Romantic relationships weren't easily sustainable and so everything was contracts and genetics, with a bit of bribery thrown if the occasion called for it.

It was a murky issue. He wasn't interested in it and so it didn't matter.

Shepard was interesting, though.

And, Shepard approved when others denied her things; questioned her and told her no, according to Massani. That could be easily handled. He would give her a small bollocking at some point about her eyelids and she would smile, impressed by his own gumption. They would eat strangely textured food and she would laugh, something Mordin had yet to hear her do in any ardent capacity, because occasional bollockings were enchanting to human women of quality.

He decided he would have to thank the human man for the advice at some point, when he had the time.


	6. Chapter 6

The original members of the Normandy SR-1 sat together in the late evenings, their voices expanding through hallways and diffusing past cryogenic pods from where the latest iteration of the ship had encompassed them completely. The Normandy SR-2 was an unsettling issue, and they didn't often speak of it.

Mordin looked down at the small standard issue cup that didn't match his own in the lab. The black liquid still smelled quite appealing when he poured it at the counter. He paused, considering the quartet in the mess hall, and then slowly made his way over to them.

"I'm not kidding, Tali," Vakarian said at the long table, irritated thoroughly. "She's different. She would have understood before."

That evening, it was suddenly a disquieting thing to be different.

Shepard hadn't let Vakarian kill someone who betrayed him during the turian's short career of hastening himself into the cleansing incalescence of Omega. She had placed herself in front of a tired man who wanted to forget himself during a single violent moment and then silently challenged him to open fire through her body when she turned away to save him.

"Garrus," Tali'Zorah hushed him uneasily. "It's been a very long time."

His subharmonics were terse. "No, it hasn't. _Not to her_."

Jeff Moreau's mug landed on the table in the mess exactly as hard as he intended it to. "And this," he muttered after the sharp sound, "is why I never take you guys anywhere." He glanced to the woman sitting next to him. "Doc, help me out here."

Karin Chakwas shifted her composure, gracefully understated. "She's utterly the same beyond the cybernetic implants running through her body," she told them. "It's dropped her temperature a degree, but otherwise she's unchanged."

"See? Just little robot lights on our Commander Christmas tree."

Chakwas smiled at Mordin when he sat down with them. "What do you think, Mordin? She spends a lot of time with you."

Moreau snorted. "Yeah, hiding from the obsessed yeoman."

Mordin blinked when everyone paused to look at him, asking for precise answers and perhaps justifications for their concerns full of vague insecurities. He felt amazingly out of place, even more so than before, and the coffee rested unsampled on the table while he regarded their question in the creeping fluorescent light.

Where was she?

She was likely in her cabin, Mordin thought, but it wasn't his place to venture there and so he didn't.

In the silence Moreau grabbed onto Mordin's cup, sliding it away and leaving his own in its place full of hot water and a tea bag . The small tag hanging off the side read _decaf_ in merry red letters, like a faint warning.

"Probably the same," Mordin said quietly, considering the new cup that was still ivory.

"How do you know?" Tali'Zorah tilted her head slightly.

"Don't, actually," he confessed, and then smiled at the quarian. "Understand the problem, endless possibilities and conclusions. Regardless, personally enjoy her now."

"That's an unscientific opinion." Moreau drank the coffee, hiding a smirk.

Jeff Moreau, now merely Joker, suddenly decided that he was Mordin Solus' friend. He didn't call the salarian an arrogant professor with tenure at _Eff You University_ from the general safety of the cockpit after that, instead carefully venturing into the lab to see what he was up to before any boldly comical assessments were made.

Joker liked to stare at wide luminescent swathes of color growing in the petri dishes that rested on the lab counter and mutter " _holy shit_ " like it was an effectively composed fecal mantra. One day, Mordin patiently explained each bacteria and fungal colony to him, describing the various deaths they could each incur.

"No touching," Mordin implored the pilot quite gravely.

"Shit, Mordin," Joker mumbled. "Remind me to never piss you off. What the hell does this green one over here do?"

"Asphyxiation through pathogenic bacteria," Mordin informed Shepard the next day while he described the pilot's reaction to his latest side project. "Not testing on us, of course. Didn't think I had to specify, but Joker got nervous."

"You teased him on purpose," Shepard chided him warmly.

Mordin smirked, full of dreams of mockery. Her eyelids moved salaciously while she listened to his stories, and he remembered that he still needed to castigate her for the silent hints toward sharply reproductive actions against his admittedly sturdy desk.

Unease settled into his body at the thought.

Aliens were single-minded creatures, from the casual liaisons of the turians to the violently amorous deviance of the krogans. During his ground missions on Tuchanka a turian ship named the Indomitable had assisted with distractions and its occupants were quite interested in Mordin and the rest of the STG team, inviting them over for an evening. He had declined, unmoved despite their appreciative compliments concerning his pigmentation.

Their interest had been purely physical, like most others, and so they left.

Perhaps he could tell Shepard about the problem gently, and then give her a small bollocking about something else to quickly lighten the mood. He coughed and decided to tell her soon, but still later. It was set aside in favor of describing his new side project where he would attempt to cure Joker's case of Vrolik's syndrome without causing expedient hepatocellular dysfunction.

Shepard remained, lingering like an indian summer whenever she smiled at him and hid from her upbeat yeoman.


	7. Chapter 7

A krogan had threatened to kill her in a standoff, but then decided not to. It was simply because she was so irresistibly eloquent; like the most ardent of peris in a charming ancient stage play.

"Like a cheap action vid from Jaëto," Kirrahe had insisted, vaguely drunk on shore leave.

Mordin became familiar with the Special Tasks tale, although he wouldn't make the connection to Commander Shepard until much later. Kirrahe had contacted him not long after it allegedly happened, proclaiming classified details about a mission where his team met a Citadel Spectre with eyelids so boldly salacious that they could halt a tempestuous male krogan in his tracks.

Mordin had shaken his head, because he didn't watch cheap action vids.

Previously the Commander of the STG Veshok-16, Kirrahe insisted on calling Mordin whenever he was inebriated. The man was often being promoted, his career a harshly flawless atonement that uplifted him through ranks that clouded his earlier insecurities and inexperience. "You held the line," the decorated salarian would eventually mutter roughly during their conversations, and the caricature of his inspiring statement hid a terse and regretful accusation about the both of them.

"Military bravado," Mordin would inevitably reply, because Kirrahe's mistakes in the field had forced him to do something else.

They usually found a reason to close the holo-call, after that.

The story curling through the grapevine turned out to be correct, however, and the furious red krogan of Special Tasks Group legend was truly an outlier, guilelessly captivated by Commander Shepard's charm when he met her again. Very few of the people she had known before her death were genuinely satisfied by her new presence with no tasks or accusations in hand to burden her with. She passed through them like a gauntlet, each one bearing against and threatening to tear pieces from the legend of her steady constancy like flowers being lifted from Ophelia in a discordant display of Shakespeare's human stage play.

"It's really you," the scarred red krogan still roared when she arrived on Tuchanka, his voice a cleansing avalanche across its surface. He rushed towards her diminutive figure. "Should have known the void couldn't hold you!"

Shepard didn't believe him when he picked her up. "Say it to me again, Wrex."

"It's really you, Shepard," he vowed with a decisive rumble that settled over her.

Wrex Urdnot uplifted her into the dry warmth of the atmosphere, because he was a friend who needed nothing from her except her authenticity and he had assured her of it in one sweeping instant.

"Wrex!"

"Shepard!"

Her laugh was sincere and unrestrained as it was caught completely with heat, pouring forth from the smile of a woman who had once been Jane Shepard and now suddenly still was. She placed her palm affectionately onto Wrex's crest while he roared affirmations to her and then one of her calves curled toward her thigh, exactly like a cheap action vid from Jaëto.

Or _Iolanthe_ , Mordin thought with a smile. It had been a Gilbert & Sullivan opera.

The scene still filled Mordin with a certain wavering sense of inconstancy that was difficult to compartmentalize, and so the muscles in his back were strictly tensed until her boots landed onto the stone with an intact thud. He reached out to place a hand on her shoulder and she stepped back when another krogan pushed in front of her. Mordin led her away from the less respectable creature, pulling against her position gently until ample space settled between her and the suddenly arguing pair of clan leaders.

Uvenk's crest was green, like blood, and he shouted passionately at Wrex.

A female krogan drenched in the same colors had once tumbled insults toward Mordin in much the same way. Then she had cut slow and luxurious vulgarities into the left side of his face, pressing him into the ground. He had responded by reaching into the dust, his hand grasping patiently at nothing with a grim persistence, and then he thrust an errant pitchfork into her face.

Jirin and Chorel were already dead, misplaced into a verdant pool spread by their Commander's inexperience.

Mordin kept his eyes open whenever the memory conjured itself. He had killed seven female krogans, including an unarmed member who attempted to radio for help. She had ripped against him before she died and irrevocably imprinted his face forever with her violent perseverance.

They had been a group of Weyrloc scouts, guarding agrarian fields that raged darkly hot against the contrast of the salarian STG team's intentions and chilling shifting parameters.

They had all been, and were no more.

"Are you alright?" Shepard asked where the population of Tuchanka no longer accosted him. There was a smile on her face, coaxing him back to the present where her cheeks flushed warmer than before and subdued the freckles there, because that was something that Commander Jane Shepard had once done and she was now allowed to do so again. Her fingers curled around the hand that still rested on her shoulder, concern beginning to cross over her face while they looked at one another.

She lifted her other hand and pressed it to his forehead in an affirmation that mimicked the krogan outlier.

"Of course," Mordin told her when she asked him again, because he knew precisely where he was at all times: he was on Tuchanka.

He closed his eyes while she touched his scarred forehead, wishing they had both found themselves somewhere else and knowing that it couldn't have happened any other way. It had to be him, or the modification of the genophage would have failed.

Other people made mistakes.


	8. Chapter 8

The human woman, Jane Shepard, had been born on a colony called Mindoir located in the Attican Traverse. When an Alliance patrol found her there, her friends and family slaughtered or corrupted by cranial implants, she immediately joined their cause as a soldier.

They outfitted her with an Ln5 implant, and transformed her into a vanguard.

She moved on to become the Hero of the Citadel, and was later relinquished and marked deceased over a planet named Alchera by a galactic council who, troubled into denial by the enormities they had been preserved from, had decided to summarily send her away.

"Yes, the reapers," Councilor Sparatus of Palaven spat out before she left, his fingers twitching near his cowl in a condescending attempt to mimic human body language for her benefit. "Let us know if you find them out there with _Saren's_ remaining geth."

Councilors Tevos and Valern had assumed stiff postures with still fingers, their lips pressed into silence.

Sparatus would attempt the motion once again, years later, when he met an apparition that was avidly tired of his _bullshit_ and quaintly told him so when she spoke to him again. A human supremacist group had summoned Commander Jane Shepard back to life, and now she would fight to save colonies similar to her own from being harvested at the edges of the galaxy. She had fostered no true allegiance to the group called Cerberus, but she cared about the colonists and so she would take advantage of any resources she could find.

The Council uneasily returned her abdicated titles and once again dismissed her from their sight.

It was a somewhat unsettling existence, and so Shepard would often close her eyes with the intention of briefly counting small lights in the darkness before once again returning calmly to the present. The expected finality of the aggrandized starscape was impenetrable and fathomless compared to the infinitely smaller disturbances that presented themselves each time she opened her eyes.

"It keeps me grounded," she explained to Mordin when he incredulously questioned her about blinking in such a way. An arc projector rested in her hands and she loaded it, chilling under the heatsink. "Are you ready, Grunt?"

The tank krogan responded by firing his assault rifle into the skies of Tuchanka. It was unprecedented for a krogan to have an alien krantt, and yet Shepard had been gifted the title twice; once to the Patriarch of Omega, and now to Grunt.

The latest disturbance rushed toward them on the large platform they stood upon.

"Seven hundred yards and closing," Mordin announced, daunted by the excess of shattered cultural assurances surrounding him when he fell into position next to her. "Chance of survival approximately sixty seven percent."

The thresher maw erupted steeply into the atmosphere of the planet and then crashed into the platform. It would either secure a krogan rite of passage for Grunt or mercilessly drag Shepard back into the carnage of her history to punish her for having the audacity to think she could have ever escaped it. Its body temperature was an endothermic thirty seven degrees Celsius and it contained five thousand and five pints of blood, protected by a carapace that was almost three meters thick.

It had murdered her entire N7 team, on a planet called Akuze.

"Are you trying to make me feel better or worse?" Shepard yelled to Mordin in the rising chaos.

Grunt bellowed, exhilarated.

"Better!" Mordin yelled back to her. "Still bad at it!"

She grinned in the rush, and he felt his latest attempt was a modest success. The arc projector rebuked the thresher maw in a long flash of ivory light and Grunt would stay on Tuchanka late into that evening, enjoying his new brotherhood with the Urdnot clan.

"No roughhousing," Shepard told Grunt with a wink that held no true intention. There was a smile on her face before she left him and it disappeared in the shuttle as Lieutenant Patel piloted the small craft back to the Normandy SR-2. She picked up a data pad that rested near her in the back, momentarily reading through it to distract herself from the exhaustion of her own adrenaline, and then passed it to Mordin with a shake of her head. "Breeding requests from Grunt's new buddies."

Mordin stared at the data pad littered with drunken contract attempts toward her and narrowed his eyes while he sat down next to her. "Subset of krogan deviants enjoy flexibility," he muttered while he read curiously through each of her private messages. He lingered on a few particularly unintelligible requests originating from the cold storms of Noveria. "Who is Lorik Qui'in?"

"A turian who wants me to upset his fruit cart," she said quietly.

His fingers hesitated on the data pad. "Fruit cart?"

"A one night stand, Mordin. I'm not interested." Shepard sighed and took the data pad back. "I get propositioned a lot because people like the idea of me."

Mordin nodded, because Massani had pointed out the issue and so now he noticed the constant flirtations. "Turians enjoy trim waists, attractive pigmentation," he recalled. "Red human hair also quite rare. Popular dyes usually contain ammonia combined with oxidizing agents, combined with alkaline compounds. Genetically unusual to have proper recessive allele pairing."

"My hair isn't fake," she insisted.

"Exactly. Considered attractive." He gave her a conspiratorial side glance. "Problematic for both of us. Very awkward."

Shepard considered the warm colors on his face and smiled again. "We're both cute redheads," she decided after a moment. She pressed her shoulder into his affectionately and then faded. She dozed, her brows furrowing occasionally, surrounded by contracts and propositions that she would refuse while requests weighed with heavier precedence were attended to.

Mordin glanced down at her uneasily, contemplating reasons to move to the other side of the shuttle bench, and then he did nothing because they were both _cute redheads_ and he enjoyed the jest of the sudden mutual title between them. He hesitated, and then reached over to brush stray strands of hair away from her eyes while she slept.

The hair bled, humanly, into his small picture when he did so.


End file.
